Riding a motorcycle requires a great amount of knowledge to effectively operate any of several different controls. Additionally, a strong kinesthetic sense of motorcycle dynamics must be developed and honed for riders to perform any of several different motorcycle maneuvers. Typically people who would like to learn to ride motorcycles lack both the knowledge and physical awareness necessary to safely learn motorcycle riding skills. In particular, new or novice motorcycle riders have not yet experienced or do not know how to shift, turn, lean, counter weight, or counter-steer as these are things cannot be experienced by driving multiple-track vehicle (e.g., a car with a pair of wheels on each of two sides of the car). This lack of experience makes for a steep and dangerous learning curve as well as heightened stress levels by the student rider. The elevated stress levels make for diminished learning situations. Therefore, a variety of motorcycle riding instructions are available for learning and/or improving motorcycle riding skills, including visual instruction media and live teacher-based instruction.
While general knowledge of motorcycle operation using a set of controls is readily available and easily absorbed from visual instruction media (e.g., books, video, animations, etc.), it is exceedingly difficult for a person to develop a physical sense of riding a motorcycle by merely viewing visual instruction media. For instance, a person can read a motorcycle instruction manual to learn to rotate the motorcycle's handlebar grip upward to accelerate and downward to decelerate. However, many motorcycle riding maneuvers would appear to be illogical and counter-intuitive if merely read in a motorcycle riding instruction manual (or for that matter, viewed in a video, etc.). The difficulty of expressing a set of instructions for executing a safe motorcycle maneuver is somewhat akin to the difficulty many sick patients have in describing how sick they feel (e.g., on a scale of 0-10, how sick do you feel?). A sick person simply has a sense that they are sick, but quantifying that feeling would seem to be an absurd oversimplification that fails to express any meaningful information. Likewise, a book or video cannot teach a person how it feels to properly lean into a turn or come to a quick and complete stop.
Thus, many people learn motorcycle riding skills with a live instructor who sits on the motorcycle with a student during an instructional session that typically occurs outside on a paved street or parking lot. Although it is possible to acquire some tactile sense of motorcycle dynamics in this instructional way, there are a variety of problems that make this approach problematic for many people. In particular, the learning environment is often an uncontrolled outdoor environment that is prone to weather and natural phenomena (e.g., a sudden rainfall occurs making the pavement slick and unsafe, the wind blows dust into a student rider's face, etc.). Furthermore, the outdoor learning environment may be unsuited for particular motorcycle maneuvers (e.g., parking lot is too small to ride the motorcycle at normal street speeds, etc.). Thus, the instruction provided by live teachers in outdoor learning environments is often inadequate. This is problematic for people who can learn about the different controls of a motorcycle through books, video, and/or instruction, but who cannot acquire an adequate kinesthetic riding sense that concrete tactile stimulation provides.
To date, these problems have not been resolved. The U.S. Pat. No. 4,978,300, issued to Letovsky et al. (“Letovsky”), discloses a motorcycle simulator that provides six degrees of movement freedom to realistically simulate a high performance motorcycle during operation. However, Letovsky's simulator includes a non-operational frame of a motorcycle and none of the components are included to hydraulically assist in simulating the riding experience. U.S. Pat. No. 3,686,776, issued to Dahl, describes a motorcycle riding simulator. However, the simulator disclosed in Dahl uses a center post supporting structure and includes a treadmill-like rolling mat on which a motorcycle is placed for simulated operation. Thus, none of these references have disclosed a supports a motorcycle in a stationary upright position for learning motorcycle riding skills, as provided in this specification.